Cu Chi tunnels: Bến Dược or Bến Đình, as the relic site describes them

The short answer

There is no single "Cu Chi tunnels" entrance. The Cu Chi Tunnels Historic Relic Site (Khu di tích lịch sử Địa đạo Củ Chi) says the tunnels are preserved at two separate places: Bến Dược, the base of the regional Party committee (Khu ủy) and of the command of the Saigon–Chợ Lớn–Gia Định Military Region, and Bến Đình, the base of the Củ Chi District Party Committee (Huyện ủy). The Ministry of Culture recognised Bến Dược as a national historic-cultural relic by Decision 54/VHQĐ of 29 April 1979; Bến Đình followed by Decision 101/2004/QĐ-BVHTT of 15 December 2004.[2][1]

The choice the site's pages describe is roughly this. Bến Dược's page lists more beside the tunnels: the tunnels of the regional command, then the martyrs' memorial temple and a reconstructed "liberated zone" reached from it.[3] Bến Đình is the district committee's base, on Provincial Road 15, with trenches, a tunnel heading toward a former US base and the wreck of a US tank.[4] XTOUR's reading is that the first suits a visitor who wants the memorial and the reconstructions as well as the tunnels, and the second one who wants the tunnels on their own; the relic site itself does not compare them.

Who runs it and what it calls itself

The pages cited here are on diadaocuchi.com.vn, the website of the Khu di tích lịch sử Địa đạo Củ Chi, which also runs an English homepage.[2] Its footer lists separate telephone lines for Bến Dược, the Bến Dược restaurant, the liberated zone, the memorial temple, Bến Đình and a base at Rừng Sác in Cần Giờ, which together show the units the site presents as its own.[1]

The site's introduction puts the tunnel network at about 250 km, "spread like a spider's web" with trenches, firing posts, sleeping and meeting chambers, medical posts, food stores, wells and Hoàng Cầm kitchens, which the page describes as kitchens that hid their smoke in the ground.[7] The visitable sections at Bến Dược and Bến Đình are parts of that network, not the whole of it.

The site's war history is written from the perspective of the Vietnamese resistance and its pages use that vocabulary; the descriptions below report what the site says, in its terms.

Bến Dược

The Bến Dược page describes a sequence. Before the ticket gate, at the edge of the forest, there is a display of US bombs and artillery and of the weapons Củ Chi's guerrillas used; past the gate, a guide leads visitors into the forest to a hall for a documentary film and an introduction to how the tunnels were built. The underground section then includes the living and working shelters of the regional committee and the military-region command, a meeting chamber, a surgery chamber, A-frame shelters built to resist collapse from nearby blasts, stores for food and weapons, trapdoors, ventilation holes, firing posts, a well, a Hoàng Cầm kitchen and workshops. Visitors are offered rice balls and cassava dipped in salt and peanut, which the page presents as the guerrillas' food.[3]

From the tunnels a path through the forest leads to the Bến Dược martyrs' memorial temple, and from there the page says visitors can take an electric car to a sand table showing the defeat of the US Operation Cedar Falls in the "Iron Triangle" in 1967 and to the liberated-zone reconstruction. The same page lists a lake modelled on the East Sea, three miniatures (the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi, Huế's Ngọ Môn gate and Bến Nhà Rồng in Ho Chi Minh City), a swimming pool, a defence-sports shooting range, paintball and a restaurant on the Saigon River.[3] Several of these are leisure services rather than heritage, and the page presents them side by side.

The memorial temple

The Đền tưởng niệm liệt sĩ Bến Dược commemorates those who died in the Saigon–Chợ Lớn–Gia Định area in the wars against France and the United States. The site's page says it stands on 7 hectares, was begun on 19 May 1993 and opened its first phase on 19 December 1995. Its gate takes the curved roofs and decoration of a village communal-house (đình) gate, and the stele house holds a 3.7-tonne stone tablet cut from an 18-tonne block from Ngũ Hành Sơn in Đà Nẵng. The main hall has an altar to the Fatherland with a statue of Hồ Chí Minh, and granite tablets carry 45,666 names, of whom, the page says, 14,077 came from 40 other provinces and cities and 800 have no known home town. The page also lists nine exhibition spaces on the city's resistance, a nine-storey tower 39 metres high and a ceramic mosaic on three walls.[5] The word đền here names a memorial temple; Vietnamese heritage words sets out how heritage bodies use it.

The reconstructed liberated zone

This is a reconstruction, not a preserved site. The page says city leaders approved the idea in 1998 on 38.5 hectares, building began in 2001 and it opened in 2003; it recreates the houses, daily life and fighting of Củ Chi between 1961 and 1972, in spaces such as one for 1961 to 1964 and one for 1965 to 1968. The page's web address and description metadata say "1960–1975", while its title, its text and the homepage say 1961 to 1972; XTOUR uses the text's dates.[1][6]

Bến Đình

The Bến Đình page places the site on Provincial Road 15 (Tỉnh lộ 15) and describes it as the base from which the Củ Chi District Party Committee directed the district from 1968 to 1975. It says tunnel-digging spread across the district from 1967, and that Nhuận Đức commune had a linked system running through four hamlets: Bàu Trăn, Xóm Bưng, Bà Thiên and Bến Đình. The reason it gives for the choice of Bến Đình is a forest of over 100 hectares on high, firm ground beside the Saigon River, which allowed a retreat toward the river.[4]

Visitors see the same documentary film and introduction as at Bến Dược. The page then lists the committee's living and meeting chambers, a weapons workshop and an exhibition of improvised weapons, a dense network of trenches, a tunnel heading toward Đồng Dù, the base of the US 25th Division ("Tropic Lightning"), and the wreck of an M41 tank that hit a guerrilla mine in 1970. A photo caption on the same page shows visitors walking through the tunnel under Provincial Road 15. Bến Đình also has a shooting range, a souvenir area and a restaurant on the Saigon River.[4]

Two addresses for the same hamlet

The relic site's pages do not agree on the administrative address of Bến Dược, and the difference matters when entering it into a map or a booking. The Vietnamese homepage gives ấp Phú Hiệp, xã An Nhơn Tây, Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, with no district.[1] The English homepage gives Phu Hiep Hamlet, Phu My Hung Commune, Cu Chi District, and the memorial temple's page gives the same pre-2025 form, ấp Phú Hiệp, xã Phú Mỹ Hưng, huyện Củ Chi.[5] Bến Đình is still given as xã Nhuận Đức, huyện Củ Chi on both homepages.[1][2]

XTOUR's reading is that the Vietnamese homepage has been updated for Vietnam's 2025 local-government reorganisation and the older pages have not; the site does not say so, and XTOUR has not read a document mapping Phú Mỹ Hưng to An Nhơn Tây. Either way, Củ Chi is administratively part of Ho Chi Minh City, not its centre: the tunnels are a trip from the Ho Chi Minh City base, not a place inside District 1. The 2025 province mergers and place names explains why addresses like these changed.

Fees, the evening programme and other sites

A notice on the site says the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council approved a higher visit fee for the site, which the notice calls a special national relic, at its session of 9 December 2020, to apply from 1 January 2021.[8] A companion notice says the site has sent written notice of the increase to organisations and tour companies.[9] Both are statements from 2020; XTOUR does not repeat the 2020 amount or publish a current price.

The site also runs an evening programme, "Trăng Chiến Khu" (war-zone moon), and announces it month by month: its notice for October 2026 gave one evening, 24 October, with tickets sold by hotline, Facebook, Ticketbox, email or at the counter at Ấp Phú Hiệp, xã An Nhơn Tây; that notice also mentioned homestay, guesthouse and tent services for visitors staying the night.[10] That was one month's programme, not a schedule, and XTOUR does not repeat its times or ticket price.

Beyond Củ Chi, the same website carries a page on the Rừng Sác war-zone relic in Cần Giờ, the base of the 10th Special Forces Regiment in the mangroves south-east of the city, and its homepage describes the national relic at 87A Trần Kế Xương in Phú Nhuận, the 1955–1958 headquarters of the Vietnam People's Army liaison delegation to the International Control Commission.[1][11] Those are separate places, not parts of the tunnel sites.

What XTOUR does not know

XTOUR does not know the current ticket price for either site, whether one ticket covers both, how long either visit takes, how far the sites are from each other by road, how physically demanding the tunnel sections are, or whether they are accessible. None of the pages read on 11 October 2026 states the last four. XTOUR also could not open cuchitunnel.com.vn, so any information published only there is not reflected here. For the country, see Vietnam.